Cisco: 70% of planet will be mobile users by 2020

Several developments over the years (and several still ongoing) have driven the rapid growth of mobile devices across the world. It also forecasts an annual run rate of 366.8 exabytes of mobile data traffic by 2020 – which it says is equivalent to 7 trillion video clips – more than 2.5 daily video clips per person on earth for a year. Moreover, Cisco says that by 2020, more people in the world will have mobile phones compared to those who have cars, tap water and electricity.

Smart devices are becoming increasingly popular, and the report predicts that by 2020 the number of smart devices will have rocketed 176 per cent to 7,802 million, from 2,821 million today. Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO) predicts that 55% of mobile data traffic will travel through Wi-Fi networks by 2020. And they are expected to drive 98 percent of mobile data traffic by that time.

There will be 11.6 billion mobile-ready devices/connections – 8.5 billion personal mobile devices and 3.1 billion M2M connections – in 2020, up from 7.9 billion total mobile-ready devices and M2M connections in 2015. This year, global IP traffic will zoom past the zettabyte mark, according to Cisco’s forecast published last May.

The slowdown will be caused by M2M traffic, which will represent 7% of overall traffic in four years’ time.

“Future mobile innovations in cellular, such as 5G, and Wi-Fi solutions will be needed to further address new scale requirements, security concerns, and user demands”, said Doug Webster, vice president of service provider marketing, Cisco. Cisco officials have been tracking the growth of mobile device use and mobile traffic for a decade, and the trends for both continue to skyrocket.

Cisco, the world’s largest manufacturer of networking equipment on Thursday released a forecast via its Visual Networking Index which states that the total Internet traffic will break the zettabyte mark this year. This average mobile connection speed will grow 3.1-fold (25% CAGR) from 2015 to 2020, reaching 3,122 kbps by 2020.

67 percent of mobile devices / connections will be smart by 2020 against 36 percent in 2015.

By 2020, M2M connections will represent 26.4 per cent of mobile-connected devices-up from 7.7 per cent in 2015.

4G connections will account for 40.5 per cent of all mobile connections-up from 13.7 per cent in 2015).

4G traffic will grow 13-fold from 2015 to 2020. 72 percent of mobile data traffic will come from 4G networks. The study sees global WiFi hotspots, including “home spots” in routers, growing from 64 million in 2015, to 432 million in 2020.